


maybe i'm meant for the sea

by volchitza



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-25
Updated: 2012-12-25
Packaged: 2017-11-22 08:32:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/607861
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/volchitza/pseuds/volchitza
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He told her stories at night when she couldn’t sleep; fantastic stories of his adventures around the world, and other lands as well. He enriched them with adjectives as splendid as the gemstones on the crown of a king; made the words feel so vivid she could almost see them enrapture her, so real she could almost taste the exotic food he spoke of in her own mouth. Verba volant, her governess and her tutors told her, scripta manent; but no written words could impress themselves so permanently on her mind as the glimmering words he spoke.</p>
            </blockquote>





	maybe i'm meant for the sea

**Author's Note:**

  * For [duskendales](https://archiveofourown.org/users/duskendales/gifts).



> for Dills again, as a Christmas present. [unbeta'ed again!]

He took her by surprise; he worked his way to her from underneath her initial rage towards him, digging like water under the earth - unnoticed, but terribly powerful.

He took her desire to know stories and unbeknownst used it against her; slowly, she found herself warming up to him - and his smirks were _terribly_ charming.

 _I can show you the wonders of the world one by one_ , his eyes seemed to promise her; and she wanted to believe it, oh, she had always wanted to escape the walls of her castle.

At first, she had been incredibly angry with him, believing him to have taken her because he thought she was the weakest in the group. _But you_ are _the weakest_ , a voice told her. _You can’t fight like Mulan and the others and you haven’t done anything like Queen Snow White or that Emma have done. Of course you’re the weakest_ , the voice would say, the worst lullaby to her nightmares.

Then she had asked him, the first time she ever spoke to him. It was a question that had burned in her stomach for days. She had entered his cabin abruptly, followed by Smee who could only babble some excuse before being dismissed with an imperious gesture of his hand. “Hook! I just want to know one thing. Have you taken me because you thought I was the weaker?”. His eyes had sparked with attention, and his voice had been oh so smooth when he reassured her that no, that definitely wasn’t the reason he took her; he simply liked her best, he had said. “Look at you, so fierce and brave. How could one think of you as weak?”, he’d said, sugary words just for her, words he hated to admit he actually believed to. She wasn’t sure if she should trust him, but little by little she started to.

He talked of the lands he had visited, of the people he had met, of the treasures he had taken. And he had such words! Such words that took her defences down one by one, until she had nothing to shield herself with - only her bare heart for him to take. His voice had sunk under her skin, into her hair, poured into her ears - soft, hoarse, with words sweeter than honey, more seducing than a Fata Morgana mirage among the sands of her deserts.

On the very first day after she had woken up, he had said one thing that had her enthralled despite its meaning; “I have stolen you”, he’d said, “and kept you sleeping a dreamless slumber with a poison I made myself, out of herbs and flowers I picked at dusk especially for you, princess”. The words came out of his mouth and she could just imagine it - the dark flowers and the bitter herbs, and the poison that would make her sleep, sleep again, but a peaceful, restful sleep. She had closed her eyes for a moment and recalled that sleep, held it dearly against her heart to remember it, cherish it. Rest. She had had _rest_.

 

The morning two days after they had set sail, Smee nervously entered the Captain’s cabin, with his head low and his hands clutching at his hat.

“What is it, Smee? I don’t have time to waste because you have lost your tongue”, Hook spit out.

“Aye Captain, of course Captain”, Smee hurriedly said. “It’s just - it’s the princess, Cap’n. She’s been closed in her room, cap’n, and she doesn’t answer. I tried to bring her food, but, err, she never opened the door and I thought, I-”

Hook got up on his feet so fast his chair fell behind him. Five seconds later, he was stomping on her door, roaring for her to open, but he didn’t bother to wait for an answer before he kicked the door open.

“I was just hoping not to slam it in your face, princess. It’d have been a terrible waste of a pretty nose, and there is such shortage of perfect noses”, he said, in a more tempered tone, when he saw she was in bed; but then he noticed her face, and the green shade of pale it was.

“Oh, please, just go away”, she pleaded in a thin voice. She hated herself for being sick - another sign of how weak she actually was. She was sure Mulan wouldn’t have been seasick in her place.

“Smee”, he said in a deep, colourless tone, “get the doctor immediately”.

The pirate left at once with a small bow, closing the door behind him.

Hook knelt - _thump_ \- next to her - _thump_ \- bed, so that his face was at the same level as hers; in her feverish state, she felt, or rather imagined, his knees hit the wooded floor one after the other in quick succession. _Thump-thump_. She knitted her brows, upset by the sound as if it had knocked on her skull. Thump-thump, it echoed in her head, _thump_ -

He took her temperature, caressed her forehead, reassured her the doctor was coming - and what was left to her if not believing him? It was a trick done by the wrinkle of worry between his eyebrows, the way his lips were parted, and how his bright blue eyes searched her face. She needed someone to rely on, someone to be close to, and his arms were open, so ready for her to fall into them, into his trap, his web. Lying on one side in her bed, she felt so tired, tired of taking upon herself the weight of sacrifice: she didn’t remember being a girl and what it meant. She faintly recalled the warmth of it - the smiles of the people around her, and their open arms. She confused his openness with theirs, and as she closed her eyes she let her barriers fall, in the abandon of one beat of her trustful heart - blind to his coldness, she thanked him, and Hook didn’t feel anything but accomplishment.

 

He told her stories at night when she couldn’t sleep; fantastic stories of his adventures around the world, and other lands as well. He enriched them with adjectives as splendid as the gemstones on the crown of a king; made the words feel so vivid she could almost see them enrapture her, so real she could almost taste the exotic food he spoke of in her own mouth. _Verba volant_ , her governess and her tutors told her, _scripta manent_ ; but no written words could impress themselves so permanently on her mind as the glimmering words he spoke.

Underlying such a treacherous path was a danger Hook did not consider - something he thought wouldn’t touch him as he weaved stories for her in such precious fabric, interwoven with lies and jewels so fine he almost fell for his own tricks. Amidst the fabulas he structured in glass castles and honey-milk rivers, foreign constellations in a sky with different colours from their own, he remembered times in which he was still called by the name he was born with, and her little grateful smiles as she drifted to sleep sometimes opened a cleft in his heart - a cleft he did not acknowledge, or dare to fathom out.

 

Aurora was on her own for the first time in her life; she had to brush her hair herself in front of an old, stained mirror in a heavy baroque frame, a gift from a tall pirate who reminded her of the colourfully dressed moors of her deserts. She ate alone when Hook wasn’t in the mood for company, and although she had tried to protest that she wouldn’t be subjugated by his mood shifts, the threath of leaving her to eat alone every meal convinced her to put up with it - at least until she’d find a way to get to him.

With time, they learnt the confines of each other’s body - how much distance should be put between each other and what kind of touching was allowed. He had once to take her by her waist during a tempest, but that didn’t count half as much as the time their hands brushed and he left the table abruptly - the cleft in his heart bleeding, tenderness threating to swallow him like one of the infinite mouths of the tumultuous sea. _Remember why she’s here_ , he had to tell himself, _you only need her to trust you so she can steal the compass for you_ \- but they were words which felt bitter to his own tongue. So that was the taste of lies, he reckoned. And he did fancy himself to be one to artistically sweeten them.

 

“Do you not get tired of the sea?”, she asked him, on a day in which clouds on the horizon only promised storms and fatigue.

He laughed bluntly and shook his head. “I never do, princess. Couldn’t. The sea is a pirate’s bride; the sea is a pirate’s mother and his death. The sea is a pirate’s goddess, and to the sea we wish to return always. When we set sail, we have no past and no future, only the flickering moment of the present outstretched to infinity on the vast glimmering water. Nereids sing us to sleep and when we wish for it, mermaids bring us the sweetest death a man can dream of. No king to rule over us but the wind; brackishness in our lungs, and sweet rhum in our stomachs at the end of a long day”, he said.

“No past and no future”, she murmured.

“No king to rule over us but the wind”, he repeated, watching her close her eyes and breathe in the salty air.

 

“So it has something of the desert”, she said a few days later, approaching him near the rail of the ship, “it was the first thing I thought when I saw it: the sea looks like a desert with waves in the place of dunes - they are just as restless, the desert and the sea, ever-moving, changing their face everyday and still being all the same”. Her gaze had been fixed on the horizon during the brief speech; he noticed how her voice had assumed a sweet tone, almost melancholic, as she spoke - it grew softer and warmer until it lit her face with a smooth light, which would have been orange and pink if it had a colour, he thought, _like a sunset at the end of summer_.

 

The days on the sea were long, but the breeze reinvigorated her, strenghtened her body and sharpened her mind; she grew hungry for adventure, the kind of adventure Hook had chased and now she wished to chase with him: she wished to set sail for a far off land, make discoveries, learn about the people in the other worlds and how they lived and in which divinities they believed - she seeked to explore all of the wonderful worlds God had created, to contemplate their beauty and sing it in songs. She had been gifted with singing at the ceremony of her christening by the good fairies, and since her childhood she had had the best musicians in the kingdom teach her music, its rules and its mathematic composition. It had become her favourite activity during the first years of her adolescence, in which she had spent many lonely hours in her rooms holding a harp, instrumental to the depth of a sadness she could not name. She sewed arpeggios to the words of her favourite poets, and the sadness was swept away by her satisfaction in finding she was able to shape and mould meaningless, disjoined notes into airy, impalpable beauty.

 

They told her in her palace that her voice was the voice of an angel; pirates said her voice was the voice of a saltwater creature, mythical and certainly dangerous.

“‘Tis the kind of things that bring shipwrecks, that’s what i’ is”, a man said, and few other men snorted out their agreement; but most shushed him, to hear the princess sing.

Hook stood by the helm, letting the wind take her voice to him and caressing the rough wood with a delicacy he would use a warm body; a fool, _a bloody fool_ , but her voice was balsamic to wounds hidden by the illusory shell of the skin.

 

“So was your father a triton or did your mother come from the sea?”, he asked her that night at dinner.

A lump of tears, hot and sudden, formed in her throat; Aurora drank a whole glass of water to send it down. She had tried very hard not to think about her parents, wondering if they were dead, or in Storybrooke, or lost in a nether world.

She faked confusion, and Hook chuckled, feeling already drunk.

“It’s already a rumor in the crew. You see, they think you must be half magical, to be able to enchant them so with your voice”. He paused to admire the way her eyelashes casted shadows down her face, emptying a glass of red wine before admitting: “I too have my own doubts”.

She laughed at this, her bright cheeks blushing. Her very laughter had an innate musicality to it; it kept ringing in his ears after it had stopped, scatteredly echoing in his wine-clouded mind. He looked at her face and he could’ve sworn it was made of white marble, marble polished by a master of sculpture, lover of aestethics, a god of arts; certainly hers was not a face made of common flesh and bone.

 

Hook had a nightmare. _Watch closely_ , she whispered, _witness how swiftly can you fall; swindle yourself your stomach doesn’t swirl; swaddle in the coldness of your heart, believe your own lies - you’ll still be a swain; you have already started to swamp._ The world twirled and swirled around him and in the wake he did not remember the dream.

 

Aurora told him three stories. One was about a painter who got tired of only working on commissions for noblemen - only ever the faces of their wives and daughters and mothers and the nomblemen themselves pompously posing in their best military uniform, again and again and again - so he took his colours and his canvases and simply left; and died with the unfinished task he had set upon himself to paint the silence (simple white, he said, wouldn’t do). The second was about a farm girl who became queen of the kingdom she lived in by outsmarting the king; the third was the saddest; about a ghost lady who in her silvery robe led the golden, youthful prince of the castle she haunted to his untimely death.

Every story she narrated left him with a sensation inside of his being like a stone falling slowly to settle on the soft sand under the sea.

 

The night was vastly illuminated by the waning moon, still almost perfectly round in the starred sky; the sea was tranquil, its dulcet waves crashing against the ship silver and black.

It was a night poets would sing about, and for lovers to hold each other; side by side, the princess and the captain stood together on the deck, observing the raw spectacle of Nature’s beauty - the world naked, and naked their perceptions, heightened, unfiltered, freed by the absence of other human beings but themselves. A whisper in such a state of the world was more poignant, more straightforward than any other sound uttered in broad daylight.

She asked him, then, about Neverland. Hook closed his eyes for so brief a moment she probably mistook it for a blink.

He knew the words exactly: knew their sound and their shape and their feeling as they rolled out on the tongue. He knew the spell they put on your heart, how it quivers in longing for that which is still unknown, still veiled, and thus full of a magic which comes from mystery alone - he spoke them in her ear.

“Second star to the right”, he murmured, and there he paused to let the winsome words sink in, cleave through her soul, to give them time to mark it forever - he felt her unconsciously hold her breath. “Then straight on till morning”.

When she turned around to smile at him, her face was brighter than the heavenly bodies above them. And for a moment, the image of Mary Darling came to his eyes, and he was a flying boy again.

 

“When we get there, when it is over-”, she began to speak one night, holding her knees to her chest in the dining room.

He gulped down the thoughts about _the end_ of it, ignored his heart, beating fast in his rib cage like a cooped up little bird. “What?”, he urged her to continue, coming across as aggressive in his defensiveness.

Aurora looked down at her small feet, almost blushing. “No, nothing”. She didn’t even know what she had wanted to say in the first place. For the first time in her life, she was unclear to her own heart.

 

Sunlight kissed everything on sight with sheer, white light; the air was filled with the pirates’ singing as they worked.

“All in the dawn the fleet was moor’d / the streamers waving to the wind / when black-eyed Susan came on board...”

Aurora sat on the stairs which brought to the helm and basked in the warmth of the sun, listening to the choir of voices which rose up in a wondrous, surprising unity. _They do not tell princesses that pirates are capable of good things_ , she thought. Their voices might not be as full and round as a minstrel’s, but they were eminent in ther sorrowfullness, as if every word they sang was a reminder of some wound.

Killian turned his head to look at her, as if called. There she was, a stolen jewel, little and with her arms entwined to the wooden banister beside her, and it made his heart warm.

 

 

_Listen to me, listen! I have a prophecy for you, and those are worth more than your gold, but I’ll give it to you anyway because I fear you might need it. Be careful, captain, not to build your own downfall, or you’ll lose everything you are._

 

He had not gone to the witches of the southern islands anymore afterwards, no matter what treasures or what information they could sell him. He had not gone to see in her eyes if the time of his doom was near.

 

 

They had a huge fight. One night, when his breath smelt of cheap liquor and his face looked empty, he spit out at her: “I will never care for you. You will never make me _care_ for you”.

Aurora slapped him, so hard and sharp his cheek was burning red; but it was her eyes, so very still and steel-cold, that pierced his soul like arrows - and there he understood how fierce and strong a woman could be, how imposing in her statuesque splendour.

 

They were dark days and she wishes now to have no memory of it.

 

Hook never uttered a word of apology for her. He did things, though, to try and make amends his own way. He protected her from the looks of certain men, who received death threats when she wasn’t around to witness the gruesome words with which he addressed the crew. He offered her the first bite at dinner and every night he walked her to her door, a gallantry he wore like a bad habit.

Then once, one night like many others that came and went, Hook leant into her, with a smirk, almost laughing at himself. He opened his mouth to make a joke, but speech burst out of him like fresh water from a spring in a rock. His voice was deep and enthralling, his words not meant to fascinate her, unlike the carefully constructed lies and stories he had told her in the past.

“Pirates hoard and hunt treasures, princess - and you are such a beautiful, fierce thing! A pirate's heart is not moved by much, but we have a lyrical soul - oh you could inspire such ballads, Aurora, such _quests_ for a strand of your hair!” He had reached out for her in hope that she would see, that she would understand, that she would correspond him. “They would lie and make it blonde comparing it to gold because they have no other words to say how splendid - _splendid_ you are”. _I have seldom been blunt to you, princess, but I have been this time_ , his eyes said, open wide, searching her face, mad with anxiety.

Her mouth was gaped open, her hand grasping for his arm and drawing him into her room. For the time in which he spoke, she had not seen nor touched nor smelt nor tasted a thing in the world, because the world had been turning around them at the rhythm of his voice.

The clatter of the old door behind him was all that echoed between them, and then - then, in a moment awake for ever in his mind, she moved towards him as he moved towards her, and so they clashed midway, mouths meeting hungrily.

Her nails digged into the flesh of the nape of his neck, willing to hurt, to draw blood; _a daughter of mermaids come to take me down_ , he thought, _what a proper, beautiful death for a sailor_. His tongue invaded her mouth in ways that had been unknown to her, used to the chaste kisses of a prince. But these were not chaste, not prince-like: everything reminded her of who he was. His most gentle touch would have been heavy by Phillip’s fingers; his lips were dry and reminded her of saltwater.

Her lips were so soft upon his he almost lost himself into thinking she were a dream, a dream, a dream - but she woke him up with teeth and nails, clinging to him and telling him in lover’s whispers how much she hated him, oh, she did! _Hated_ him. He snorted from his nose in response and single-handedly took her wrists, forcing them behind her back. She struggled as he brought her to bed, half unraveling the ties and laces of her bodice, half cutting them with the hook; he tossed it away and she hit him on the head, but when he went to kiss her again he found her mouth already open. “I hate you”, she chanted as they undressed each other, “I hate you”, but the security in her voice was dying out.

Hook kissed her behind her neck and on her collarbone, strangely sweet, and with contemplative sacrality he let her dress fall to her waist, admiring her body in the light of the oil lamps. Her skin was so pure, so transparent, so noble you could see the veins of her bosom through it, intersecting pathways in her breast - marble, veined marble under his touch, shivering marble.

They moved together, uncareful and wild, like the waves do in tempests; he saw as she shoved her head backwards how freedom and boldness shone on her face, bright and beautiful as an everlasting beam of light - and he loved her, splendid as she was, he loved her, amazed by how she could retain her innocence, with pearls of love-sweat crowning her hairline.

Her fingers laced patterns in his hair and her bones left bruises on him, marks to match her own, that would blossom under his skin into purple flowers.

She heard him when he mouthed against her skin that he loved her, by God, she heard him in the frenzy of pleasure. She wanted to answer, she wanted to say that she never, ever would - but she would speak empty words, so she kept silent, biting into his shoulder when she feared she would scream.

She told herself she was too tired to kick him out when he had the audacity of lying next to her.

 

In sleep, she had nested herself into his arms; waking up, she smelt him, strong and manly and sea-like. She went back to sleep with a tiny smile.


End file.
